blog
telling the story again
I went to the press night of Into The Woods at the Bridge Theatre last night. I’ve seen the 2014 film but never the production on stage, so this was a real treat. The set design was gothically lush, Medievally magic and dark.
© Johan Persson
Apart from the addition of the baker’s tale, the plot features an amalgamation of fairytales we all know: Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Rapunzel, Jack and the Beanstalk. These are stories we tell again and again.
What surprises me is how much we can feel for a story we already know the end to — how much emotion it can wring out of us with each retelling. I saw Jack Thorne’s A Christmas Carol last year and it did that very thing. My eyes blurred with tears as Ebenezer Scrooge saw the child he once was, and cried,
I don't want him to be me!
When I cried it felt like I was experiencing a new response to this story. What a sucker punch delivered by a character we encounter yearly.
Although we can have new experiences to old stories, I think the appeal of revisiting them isn’t necessarily to find something new within them, but to use them as an assurance that things don’t ever have to change. But Into The Woods subverts our need as an audience for predictability in stories.
The first act of Sondheim’s Into The Woods ends with each character achieving their happy ending: Cinderella and Rapunzel have their princes, Jack his cow, Little Red has been swallowed by the Wolf and survives, the Bakers have their child. With that final tableau, we as an audience are satisfied: our stories have been delivered to us, intact.
And then life goes on.
The second half begins, pushing both the characters and audience forward into the true forest, a deep unknown without the safety net of a tale to be told. What happens next? We were never given this part of the story. This loss of plot/path is symbolised most clearly by the death of the narrator, not far into the first few minutes of Act 2. Now, what once came together for each protagonist in the first act unravels just as quickly. Our heroes and heroines are plunged into a reality (or un-reality) where they must write their own stories, and grieve the endings they believed were theirs forever. The baker loses his wife, Jack loses his mother, Cinderella walks away from her prince and Rapunzel loses everything, taking her witch-mother with her.
Can we be betrayed by our stories? Do we expect them to remain predictable and safe, to never cross the confines of their plot? To assure us that life plays out the same way: a happy ever after is deserved and eternal?
Into The Woods plays with the idea of stories’ futures. It shows one possibility for future within a well-known story: to keep going and write what happens next. The risk there is that we might end up with a new ending we don’t want— the comedy is turned into a tragedy.
For an alternative story future, I think of Anais Mitchell’s Hadestown.
After Orpheus turns around to look for Euridyce, Hermes (who acts as narrator in this story) sings:
It's a sad song
But we sing it anyway
'Cause here’s the thing
To know how it ends
And still begin to sing it again
As if it might turn out this time
I learned that from a friend of mine
The future of the Orpheus and Euridyce story is a retelling. To climb the staircase again and again. Orpheus will turn his head. He will lose. Rinse. Repeat.
In Hadestown, Hermes and the chorus affirm:
It's an old tale from way back when
And we're gonna sing it again and again
The meaning is clear: if we retell this story, we can revert to a place of hope and innocence. The ending will dissolve into something imaginary, even if this retelling is doomed to follow the same path.
Is that the future of a well-worn story? Is a retelling the only appropriate afterlife for happy ever after? Perhaps this is true— we want the re-setting of the stage, the opporunity to start again, to have hope in spite of what might come next.
See, Orpheus was a poor boy
But he had a gift to give
He could make you see how the world could be
In spite of the way that it is
The most persistent future for these stories is to go back to the start, not to push ahead. Our beloved characters live in a loop, experiencing the same chain of events over and over. That is the most enticing future we readers and spectators can give to them. If we do imagine different futures, none are as compelling as the well-worn groove of the classic tale. The path in the forest always leads to grandmother’s house. Orpheus will always lose.
Even at the end of Into The Woods, a show which explores what lies beyond endings, we go back to the start. Taken from the final song of the musical:
[BAKER'S WIFE]
Just calm the child
[BAKER]
Yes, calm the child
[BAKER'S WIFE, spoken]
Look, tell him the story
Of how it all happened
Be father and mother
You'll know what to do
. . .
[BAKER, spoken]
Shh
Once upon a time...
In a far-off kingdom...
There lived a young maiden...
A sad young lad...
A childless baker...
With his wife...
As I said earlier, I think the appeal of retelling stories isn’t to seek something new, but to seek assurance. Things don’t ever have to change, right? We can just tell the same story over and over, and live in imaginary foreverness. Right?
✶ ✶ ✶
currently: eating fruit pastilles (the red & black ones) click here to to reply via email
✶ ✶ ✶
one constant good
✶ ✶ ✶
currently: listening to Findlay Napier's 'Call Me If You Need Me' click here to to reply via email
✶ ✶ ✶
Scots in Antarctica
Enjoyed reading this short essay on Scottish Antarctic literature by Ellen Frye.
Particularly, this question at the end:
The diverse accounts of Scots in Antarctica prompt readers to address fundamental questions: we ask ourselves, What is our Antarctic? What do we battle, nearly hopelessly, yearning to surmount?
And this highlighted excerpt from Dr Gavin Francis’ book, Empire Antarctica:
[S]ublime landscapes can teach us a lesson that we might otherwise only learn through hardships: that the universe is unimaginably vast, that we are relatively small and fragile, that we must accept our limitations, and get on with enjoying the magnificent aspects of being alive (101).
No Such Thing As A Natural Disaster
I’ve just had such an interesting conversation with Ilan Kelman, Professor of Disasters and Health at UCL. We met at Earth’s Canvas, an event for geologists and artists at the Geological Society last year, and he handed me his card after my talk on Pop Music and Geology. “If you ever want to write songs about disasters,” he said. And I thought, what a strange thing to write songs about.
Moving house, I came across his card tucked in a pocket of a handbag, and I decided to reach out. Today I met him on the UCL campus and we talked about disasters, floods, the Covid 19 pandemic, attachment to land and identity, rebuilding and relocating, volcanic eruptions, Aberdeen and Deeside, the oil industry and its effect on Aberdeen, the wider reaches of the fossil fuel industry and Piper Alpha, coastlines and wildfires, Antarctica and public health.
I’ve been on an investigative kick recently… I’m starting to become curious again around Earth Sciences: a potential project, but not knowing what it might be. After I released my geology album, I thought I was going to move on to a different topic, with music being the main through-line in my work. But now I’m realising that I don’t feel done with geology, or earth science. I feel like the album just scratched the surface. It asked the first question.
Now I want to ask the next question.
When I sat down with Ilan, I asked him: “what is the one thing related to your research that you wish the wider public knew?” and he said, “there is no such thing as a ‘natural disaster.’ There is just nature.”
Talking to him reframed my idea of what a volcanic eruption or a flood is. Is it a natural disaster, or is it just a natural process which happens to cause disaster for humans or other living species?
Volcanoes erupt and the soil around them is enriched. Cliffs tumble into the water, injecting new material into ecosystems. Wildfires help forests to clear out waste and fertilise the land.
We talked a lot about floods in the UK, and he is currently working on a project centered on Britain’s coastlines. “The next 10,000 years” was a phrase which came up a couple of times in conversation. What would it be like to focus on the next 10,000 years?
Flooding instantly makes me think of Ballater and Braemar— Royal Deeside— where recent floods have changed the shapes of my home river, the river Dee. I feel a lot of affinity for and ownership over this part of land, at the gate of the Cairngorms. My grandparents used to live out in Braemar, and we would make the journey from Aberdeen to the village at least three times a year. The A90 follows the river Dee. You see silver flashes of it along the journey. The bends of the river end up dictating the shape of the road.
There is a castle which sits at the edge of a riverbank, very close to Ballater. Built in the 16th century, it’s called Abergeldie Castle. I never really noticed it on our drives to Braemar, but in recent years I have, because the flooding in Deeside has eroded the riverbank so much, it actually almost cuts underneath the castle itself. Abergeldie is one of the many little landmarks on the journey between Aberdeen and Braemar, and, like all of these landmarks, it will one day disappear. Maybe it will be a crumbled ruin in the river in 20 years’ time.
Our conversation this morning made me realise that we have to be okay with things changing. The landscape owes us nothing, it cannot protect us. And should we mourn its changes? Is any natural process truly destructive, as in, no-coming-back-from-this destructive? Or will it just be different?
We need to learn to accept change and be prepared to move, rebuild. Buy a house with the capability of accepting floods, or rebuild off of a potential flood plain.
Why are we so attached to the way things are? And the structures which we live in? My one theory was that we have become much more dependent on our individual houses in the last few decades. The internet has made working from home, almost everything-from-home possible. I’ve had to move a lot as a kid because of family, and then I’ve moved a lot around Scotland and away to Canada and even just within London I’ve lived in 8 different houses. I am not attached to a house. But I am attached to a landscape: Deeside.
Ilan presented me with a potential project title:
“Scales of change for Scottish identity and memory”
Scotland is slowly uplifting after being pushed down by ice sheets from the Pleistocene. It’s literally bouncing back up, albeit very slowly. How does that slow change measure up against the faster changes: the flooding? The landslides? I once researched the Storegga slides, the largest known submarine landslides which occurred off the Norwegian continental shelf about 6,000 years ago. What other major natural events (which people may consider as ‘disasters’) have occurred which have changed the face of Aberdeen and the surrounding area? What does it mean for the future and our attachment to the places we live?
Questions I am asking
what do we owe landscapes, and what do landscapes owe us?
why are we so afraid of our landscapes changing?
is there evidence of the Storegga landslides in Aberdeenshire?
how has the river Dee changed over my lifetime, and what will it look like in 10,000 years?
I also touched on my desire to do research in Antarctica. It feels like the wildest dream, but I’ve had it ever since I found out that ‘musician in residence’ for a summer in Antarctica was an actual honest-to-God role one could have. We have the beginnings of a plan for it.
There are things to be discovered!
✶ ✶ ✶
currently: writing in a cafe I used to work in back in 2016 click here to to reply via email
✶ ✶ ✶